He tried to be polite and listened attentively to the lady on his right, who was telling him the latest gossip about a certain famous marriage.  But his air was so manifestly artificial that she turned to the presumably more attractive topic of his doings.

“You look ill,” she said—­she was one who adopted the motherly air towards young men, which only a pretty woman can use.  “Are they over-working you in the House?”

“Pretty fair,” and he smiled grimly.  “But really I can’t complain.  I have had eight hours’ sleep in the last four days, and I don’t think Beauregard could say as much.  Some day I shall break loose and go to a quiet place and sleep for a week.  Brittany would do—­or Scotland.”

“I was in Scotland last week,” she said.  “I didn’t find it quiet.  It was at one of those theatrical Highland houses where they pipe you to sleep and pipe you to breakfast.  I used to have to sit up all night by the fire and read Marius the Epicurean, to compose myself.  Did you ever try the specific?”

“No,” he said, laughing.  “I always soothe my nerves with Blue-books.”

She made a mouth at the thought.  “And do you know I met such a nice man up there, who said you were a great friend of his?  His name was Haystoun.”

“Do you remember his Christian name?” he asked.

“Lewis,” she said without hesitation.

He laughed.  “He is a man who should only have one name and that his Christian one.  I never heard him called ‘Haystoun’ in my life.  How is he?”

“He seemed well, but he struck me as being at rather a loose end.  What is wrong with him?  You know him well and can tell me.  He seems to have nothing to do; to have fallen out of his niche, you know.  And he looks so extraordinarily clever.”

“He is extraordinarily clever.  But if I undertook to tell you what was wrong with Lewie Haystoun, I should never get to the House to-night.  The vitality of a great family has run to a close in him.  He is strong and able, and yet, unless the miracle of miracles happens, he will never do anything.  Two hundred years ago he might have led some mad Jacobite plot to success.  Three hundred and he might have been another Raleigh.  Six hundred, and there would have been a new crusade.  But as it is, he is out of harmony with his times; life is too easy and mannered; the field for a man’s courage is in petty and recondite things, and Lewie is not fitted to understand it.  And all this, you see, spells a kind of cowardice:  and if you have a friend who is a hero out of joint, a great man smothered in the wrong sort of civilization, and all the while one who is building up for himself with the world and in his own heart the reputation of a coward, you naturally grow hot and bitter.”

The lady looked curiously at the speaker.  She had never heard the silent politician speak so earnestly before.

“It seems to me a clear case of chercher la femme,” said she.